SNMP Traps are a great tool to use for when you want immediate alerts or when your equipment only supports traps. Traps are UDP. The biggest downside to traps is they are one way. Your device will send out the trap, but it will never get a response back. If the trap it sent is lost, it will never know to send a new one, it will just wait until the next scheduled time to send a trap. This can cause gaps in data. The upside to a trap is they can fire off immediately when there is an issue, where snmp polling will only check the device every few minutes or however the administrator has it configured. So if the device was polled, then it had an issue a few seconds later you would not know about it until the next poll. Where a trap can be sent the second an event on the device is triggered, giving you a real time alert.
Let’s configure SolarWinds to accept traps. SolarWinds can handle around 500 traps per second using the recommended hardware. You will need to make sure port 162 is open on any firewalls you have. 162 is the port Traps use. You will also need to configure the device to send the traps to SolarWinds and make sure nothing on the network is blocking port 162.
To Verify you are getting traps, you can open the trap viewer on the SolarWinds server that comes with the Engineers toolset. You should immediately start seeing traps show up in the viewer if your server is receiving traps.
To view the traps in the web console, login to SolarWinds and click Alerts & Activity’s then traps, It will bring you to a page showing you all of the traps.
You should see something like this
There is a lot more customization that can be done, we will cover that in another guide.